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Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Whooped too soon!

Ah, the euphoria of free internet access was short lived!

In the 5 minutes that I had the PC connected directly to the wireless bridge (i.e., no firewall/router) I got infected with FOOBOT - or some familiar sounding virus - and was nodoubt responsible for SPAMing several hundred million people.

Trickly little blighter. The first thing it does is update your .../etc/hosts/ file and aliases Symantec, McAfee, etc., to localhost. So when you try to go out and buy an anti-virus product you get Server Not Responding messages.

Lucky I know a thing or too about these personal comfuser things.

Renamed sys32.exe and rebooted. That stopped the fucker. Then used the Linksys to shutdown all my outgoing ports, except HTTP, until I get secure again.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Free Internet - W00-hoo!

Say hello to Free Metropolitan WiFi!! Just cancelled my DSL service and am now surfing for free via the Metro-Fi network of Santa Clara. I give 'em six months before they're (a) out of business or (b) part of Google.